Comeback Page 4

  “I know,” Parker said.

  Brenda said, “I want to tell you, Ed, I’ll be leaving a whole lot of cosmetics back in that room.”

  “We’ll buy you a suitcase of the stuff,” Mackey promised her, “out of Liss’s share.”

  “Good.”

  “But the other problem is,” Mackey went on, “we can’t go to that empty house where we were gonna stash the goods, because naturally Liss knows about that place, and he just might show up there.”

  “Well, we can’t drive around all night,” Brenda said, taking a random right turn. “Some cop‘11 stop us just on general principles, and then he’ll want to look at our laundry back there.”

  Mackey said, “The same thing would happen if we try to drive out of town. This is a very tense location right now. And if we go check into some other hotel somewhere at this hour in the night, we’re still drawing too much of the wrong kind of attention.”

  “What we want now,” Parker said, “is an all-night gas station.”

  Mackey frowned, leaning against Brenda to look at the gas gauge on the dashboard. “Why?”

  Brenda, quicker than that, said, “I saw one out by the interstate.”

  Looking past Mackey’s confused frown at Brenda, Parker said, “We’ll get out a block before you reach the place. You go on in, you tell the guy you just got off the interstate because there’s something knocking under the hood and you don’t know what it is.”

  “The dumb broad in the car,” Brenda said.

  “That’s right.”

  Mackey’s frown turned to a smile. “He puts it on the rack,” he said. “Inside.”

  Brenda said, “So I better tell him it’s something with the brakes. Otherwise, we’ll just stay outside by the pumps and he’ll look under the hood.”

  Mackey beamed at Brenda’s profile. “You see, Parker?” he said. “You see what I mean?”

  “Yes,” Parker said, and bent his head to look in the outside mirror once more. Something? He squinted at the distorting mirror—objects in mirror are closer than they appear was etched into the glass—but there was nothing back there but parked cars, dark houses, streetlights, traffic lights playing solitaire. Had there been something? Hard to tell. Nothing now. Maybe it had been a car crossing an intersection back there.

  It was another ten minute drive to the gas station, during which one police patrol car passed, going the other way. It slowed as they came together, the two cops giving the people in the station wagon a very long stare, but Brenda smiled and waved at them, and they nodded with dignity and drove on.

  “One thing I don’t want to have to do,” Brenda said, sounding a little nervous as she watched the police car recede in her mirror, “is outrun a lot of cops in their town.”

  “At that point,” Parker told her, “we give the whole thing up. Lose the car and the goods, and go to ground.”

  “Don’t even think it,” Mackey said.

  They saw no more traffic, and then there was the gas station with all its gleaming lights, out ahead of them, an oasis of glitter in the surrounding dark. Beyond the station’s lights, occasional smaller lights could be seen going by, fifteen or twenty feet up in the air; the big trucks on the interstate overpass.

  “We’ll get out here,” Parker said to Brenda, “and we’ll give you five minutes.”

  “Fine.”

  Brenda pulled the station wagon to the curb, and the men got out. Looking back the way they’d come, Parker frowned. Had something moved back there? As Brenda drove away, Parker stepped into the street, peering down the long empty stretch of it. No movement. Just the darkness.

  “What is it?”

  “Nothing,” Parker said.

  The gas station was on this side, a block and a half away. They crossed the street and walked down the opposite sidewalk. Facing the gas station was a closed tire store, with sale signs in the windows. They paused there to look across the way, through the large open doorway into the service area. Over there, Brenda was just backing the station wagon into the service area, on the side with the lift, being directed by a skinny kid in white company coveralls and his own baseball cap. He seemed to be the only one on duty tonight.

  “We have time,” Parker said. “I want a look at the ramp.”

  They walked on another long block to the two on-ramps for the interstate, and saw a state highway patrol car parked on each one, tucked up partway along the ramp, so you’d already have made the turn before you saw it. “Just like we thought,” Mackey said.

  ‘Just like we knew,” Parker said.

  The one advantage was, where the highway patrolmen were, they wouldn’t be aware of anything going on at the gas station. Leaving them there, keeping to the shadows, Parker and Mackey walked back and went beyond the gas station again before crossing to its side of the street and making their approach.

  The kid had the station wagon up on the lift now and was checking the brake fluid, which should have kept him occupied, except that there was a bell over the office door that sounded when Parker entered, Mackey coming in behind him. Parker went to the doorway connecting the office with the service area, while Mackey went straight to the messy metal desk and riffled through the drawers, shoving credit card slips and other junk out of the way.

  The kid came in fast, polite and ready to serve, but holding the wrench he’d used to open the brake drum cap. “Sorry, gentlemen, I didn’t hear your car come—” He took in the absence of a car out by the pumps at the same time he saw Mackey at the desk. “Hey!”

  Mackey straightened, shaking his head at the kid, disappointed in him. “You don’t have a gun in here,” he complained.

  Bewildered, the kid stared at Mackey and said, “No! What do we want with a—? What are you doing there!”

  Mackey came around the desk toward the kid, spreading his empty hands, saying, “That’s a hell of a thing. What if we were robbers?”

  It had crossed the kid’s mind that that’s just what they were. Blinking from Parker to Mackey, both of them now too close to him, he said, “You’re not?”

  “Not at the moment,” Mackey said, and grinned.

  Parker held out his hand. “If you give me the wrench,” he said, “the lady behind you won’t have to crack your head open.”

  Everything was happening too fast; the kid could never get set, never get a response ready before the encounter took another turn. Looking over his shoulder, he saw Brenda there behind him, holding up a shiny large socket wrench for him to see. She wasn’t smiling. She looked businesslike. The kid said, “You’re with these guys?”

  Mackey laughed. “She’s the boss!” he announced. “That’s Ma Barker!”

  “The wrench,” Parker said.

  The kid shrugged, and handed it over. “If you’re not gonna hold the place up,” he said, “then I don’t get it.”

  “We’re all going to stay here a while,” Parker told him. “Where do you turn off the lights?”

  This astonished the kid more than anything so far: “You want to close,?”

  “You’re getting a vacation,” Mackey explained. “An unexpected brief vacation.”

  Parker tapped the kid’s chest with the wrench, leaving a grease smear on the white coveralls. “The lights.”

  The kid blinked, then pointed at the circuit breaker box on the back wall behind the desk. “We do it there,” he said. “You can’t turn them all off, though. There’s some stuff we’ve got to leave on.”

  “For now,” Parker said, “just turn off the outside lights.”

  Reluctant but obedient, the kid did as he was told, wide-eyed, as though it were some kind of sacrilege to close a 24-hour gas station.

  Next, they had him lower the hydraulic lift, to bring the station wagon back down, and shut and lock the service area door, a double-width overhead garage door full of rectangular windows. Then they looked around at their new environment and found, at the right rear of the service area, a door to a storage room that was tucked in behind the office. Long a
nd narrow, the storage room was full of fan belts and cans of oil and high wooden racks of tires. The door was open, but there was a padlock on the hasp on the outside.

  Mackey said, ”Write down the combination, will you?”

  “I’m not sure I know it,” the kid said, deciding to be crafty.

  Mackey shrugged. “That’s up to you,” he said. “We’re gonna lock you in there now, so you won’t be in our hair. I figured to let you out when we go, but you want to take your chances on somebody coming along, that’s up to you.”

  The kid remembered the combination then, and wrote it on a service order pad. He also asked if he could bring into the room with him the two magazines from the desk that he’d been reading, and they said okay. He went in without trouble, dragging along a wooden chair and carrying his magazines. He even grinned at them tentatively as they closed the door.

  Fixing the padlock, Mackey said, “Not a bad kid. A bright future, I think.”

  “A smart kid,” Parker said. “He knows he wants a future.”

  They turned off the rest of the lights, shutting the station entirely. A little illumination seeped out from under the storage room door, where the kid was reading his magazines, but not enough to be seen out in the street.

  Mackey and Brenda caught up on some of their missed sleep in the station wagon. Parker made himself as comfortable as he could on the vinyl stuffed chair in the office, feet up on the desk. He dozed off a few times, never for very long, and then one time he opened his eyes and it was daylight; six or six-thirty in the morning.

  And what had awakened him was a city police car out there, just pulling to a stop, this side of the pumps. There was only one cop in it. He got out on this side, and turned his back to look out over the top of his car at the street, looking left and right. His uniform was the wrong size, legs too short, jacket too loose.

  Parker put his feet on the floor and leaned forward. The cop turned and started toward the office, right hand unhooking the flap on his holster, closing around the service revolver in there. Under the police cap, it was George Liss.

  PART TWO

  1

  Seven hours before some atheistic sons of bitches robbed the Reverend William Archibald of four hundred thousand dollars, he woke up alone in bed. “Now where the hell is she?” he said.

  Tina, having heard the familiar rich baritone voice, immediately popped out of the bathroom, saying, “Here I am, Will.” Her heavy ash-blonde hair framed that willing face in a mad tangle, still mussed from sleep. She was naked, and remained the only woman in Archibald’s experience to overflow her birthday suit. “Is there something you want, honey?” she asked.

  He looked at her standing there, open, amiable, those round cheeks bracketing a full-

  lipped mouth succulent with sleep. “Come to think of it,” he said, “there is.”

  Fifteen minutes later, Archibald was whistling in the shower while Tina ordered breakfast from room service. By the time he was dressed in his pinstripe blue suit, white shirt and figured blue tie, his sleek jowls gleaming with aftershave and his pewter hair brushed into corniche waves, breakfast was waiting in the living room of the suite, set up at the table by the big window overlooking the view, which Archibald ignored. Every town was the same, finally, if you didn’t live in it; just a collection of tall and short buildings containing people who might be helped by Reverend Archibald’s ministry, and might help the reverend in return. Now, seating himself before his bacon and eggs, home fries, orange juice, toast and coffee, he said a heartfelt, “Thank you, Lord,” and tucked in.

  Tina appeared ten minutes later, having completed her daily transformation. In her pale gray suit, white blouse with neck ruffle and low-heel black shoes, with her hair tamed into a bun, her pale and subtle makeup, and her horn-rim spectacles—she was blind as a bat, and wore those glasses everywhere except in bed, where she got along quite well by feel—she was no longer the compliant and indulgent Tina of their nighttime hours, but Christine Mackenzie, conductor of the Reverend Archibald’s Angel Choir. The mouth was still loose and carnal now, when she smiled hello, but when singing “Just a Closer Walk with Jesus” those lips could appear to be swollen with nothing more than heavenly love. Heavenly.

  At Tina’s place, across the table from Archibald, the breakfast consisted of half a grapefruit, two slices of dry toast and tea without milk. Tina was a lush girl inside that gray suit, but it was a lushness that could spill into over-ripeness, as they both well knew. Limiting herself to a diet that the monks of the Middle Ages would have chosen for penitent reasons, to the castigation of the body and the greater glory of God, but doing so for rather different reasons of her own, Tina managed to hold her abundance in check, to keep herself at a level that was no more than what the kikes call zaftig. (The bastards even have their own language.)

  From the very beginning of his ministry, William Archibald had understood that the appearance of propriety was the name of the game. It wasn’t merely that the appearance of propriety was as good as propriety itself, but that it was much better. If the appearance of propriety were steadfastly maintained—religiously maintained, you might say—a reasonably careful man could have it all; the rich rewards of religion and the rich rewards of life. And that’s what he wanted: it all.

  Archibald wasn’t a hypocrite. He believed that man was a sinful creature and he said so, publicly and often, never excepting himself. He believed that his ministry had held back many a fellow human being from committing crimes and sins untold. He believed that his contributions to the social order, his civilizing influence on men and women who were in many ways still one small step from the apes, were practical and immense, and he firmly believed he was worth every penny he made out of it. His ministry had rescued drunkards, saved marriages, reformed petty thieves, struggled successfully at times against the scourge of drugs, cured workplace absenteeism and given a center and a weight and a sense of belonging to unnumbered empty, drifting, useless chowderheads. If, in his leisure moments, he liked to ball a big-titted woman, so what?

  They were finishing breakfast when Dwayne Thorsen came in, looking brisk and competent in a gray suit that managed to be as respectable as Archibald’s without competing with it. Dwayne’s twenty years in the Marine Corps had left him lean and mean, and his seven years as Archibald’s executive assistant had done nothing to change him. He still preferred his old cropped-short Marine haircut (the stubby hair pepper-and-salt gray now), his comfortable but ugly black oxford shoes, and his government-issue wire frame round-lens glasses, through which his pale eyes skeptically gleamed like the coldest sunny day in Norway, from which his thinlipped hard-working farmer forebears had emigrated a century ago.

  “Morning, Dwayne,” Archibald said. “Order yourself some coffee.”

  “Ate.”

  There was a third chair at the table, facing the view. Like the other two, it was armless, with a cushioned seat and delicately scrolled wooden back. When Dwayne’s big-knuckled hand reached for it, the chair seemed to flinch, as though sure it would be kindling in a minute, but Dwayne merely pulled it out from the table, sat in it, ignored the view as much as the others had, ignored Tina as well—he usually did, facing her when he absolutely had to with a fastidious sneer—and said, “All set.”

  “Well, naturally.” Archibald smiled at his assistant. “If you’re in charge, Dwayne, it’s all set.”

  Dwayne shrugged that off. “Morning news says six hundred of them camped at the arena last night.”

  Not unexpected. Since Archibald’s crusades offered no advance sales and had no reserved seating or credit card sales or anything else except cash on the barrelhead as the customer walked in the gate, and since his draw had only increased with the television ministry, it was usual these last few years for a number of people to bring sleeping bags or deck chairs and camp out the night before at the gate of the stadium or arena where he was to appear, to be certain of getting in. Still, six hundred was a pretty impressive number, and Archibal
d couldn’t help a little smile of satisfaction as he said, “Radio news or television news?”

  “Both. Local insert on Today, and just about every local radio news spot.”

  Good. Archibald would have no trouble selling out this twenty-thousand-seat arena, but it was nice anyway to let other people, people who so far were insufficiendy aware of the Reverend William Archibald, know that this attraction was such a grabber it drew six hundred overnight campers. Better than the World Series.

  Dwayne went on, “Security’s shitty at this place, though I don’t suppose it matters.”

  “Dwayne,” Archibald said comfortably, sopping up the last of his egg yolk with the last of Tina’s second piece of toast, “you say that every place we go.”

  “It’s true every place we go,” Dwayne said. “These outfits today, they’re not used to cash.”

  “Dwayne, Dwayne,” Archibald said, “who’s going to steal from the ministry?”

  “Well, we’ve had some, now and then.”

  “Pilfering. Employees, misguided smalltime people. You find them out, Dawyne, you always do, and I give them a good talking-to.”

  “And then I,” Dwayne said, “kick their butts into the street.”

  “But we haven’t had anybody like that for a long time,” Archibald said. “You pick those people with a great deal of care, Dwayne.”

  “Which brings me,” Dwayne said, “to this boy Carmody.”

  Archibald sighed. “A knottier problem than most,” he admitted.

  “I think we ought to get rid of him.”

  “For zealousness? Dwayne, we’ve never had to do anything like that before, and I just worry it could backfire on us.”

  “He’s making trouble,” Dwayne insisted. “He’s an infection that could spread. I like my troops motivated.”

  “Yes, of course. But the press, Dwayne. The press is a constant affliction. If Tom Carmody’s disaffection led him to the wrong reporter, if he found a sympathetic ear in the media to listen when he says we threw him out because he got religion, it could be very bad. Very bad.”